Quote Originally Posted by Pete View Post
I don't see the Army as having lost its approach to training during or after Vietnam.
Did you serve in it before Viet Nam? After VN, we dumbed down training to cope with McNamara's Project 100,000 intake with the task condition and standard foolishness; and even though those losers are long gone and we have some sharp troops, we're still using that flawed training model. We also concentrated solely on fighting a major land war in Europe to the exclusion of other theaters and other levels of combat. Absolutely foolish. I'm thoroughly familiar with both DePuy and Starry and am not a fan of either. The only saving grace in that period was Shy Meyer as Chief of Staff. He had great plans for the training arena but TRADOC just waited him out; the bureaucracy won.
...the active defense and all that.
Ah, yes -- with Battle Books. Any tactical evolution that requires a three ring binder to execute will get you killed. Quickly.
With unconventional wars being our most likely challenge during the next several decades...
Why is that so? They will only be if we allow that to happen. I guess we could be dumb enough to play by the other guys rules; we certainly have before -- but that doesn't seem very smart to me. I think we should make them play by our rules...
I'm trying to understand how we should go about maintaining our core competencies in combined arms while we're simultaneously facing unconventional adversaries.
First, we aren't all that competent at the core -- never have been in peacetime -- not allowed to do that in a democracy, the mothers get upset at training casualties and Congress gets upset at spending training money instead of equipment money which provide more jobs.

Second, core competency for an Army is basic simple warfighting, it is not difficult. We now half train people and hope for the best. That is not a good plan. If individuals can do the basics well, they can easily and quickly adapt to any level on the spectrum of warfare with decent leadership. We understood how to do what you're trying to understand in the late 50s and early 60s. We just forgot and then got really dumb post VN in an effort to avoid another war like that -- then we wandered into two more.

The key thing to remember is that if you deploy general purpose forces to a Foreign Internal Development (FID) or security Force Assistance (SFA) effort as in Iraq and Afghanistan, it will not be done well -- you're using a sledge hammer to build a piece of cabinetry...